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Balthazar Auger

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That’s right, game reveal time yeah! Sorry for teasing you for so long.

Check out www.timewatchgame.com for more, or I guess I’ll keep talking about it more openly now here (nobody reads this blog anyways)

I am back from San Francisco where I attended GDC. I wasn’t planning on going, but then since we submitted the game to the EGW and got accepted, well, I kinda had to.

The entire EGW session has been uploaded publicly to the GDC Vault so if you go to the 42 minute mark you can see me nervously attempt to explain the game to a huge crowd.

This was actually my first time being recorded while speaking in public and BOY DO I MOVE MY HANDS A LOT.

I was pretty nervous but hey, it was fun!

Bonus anecdote: sharing a session with Petri Purho, 10 years after sharing the IGF expo floor with him. I had even made a post about it at the time and everything… So this is what being old as fuck feels like…

I am super pleased (and freaked out) to announce that Secret Project’s first public appearance will be at the 2018 Experimental Gameplay Workshop, held on the last day of GDC.

I’ve made a point of attending that session in the years I’ve been to GDC, and seeing the selected games and prototypes has been an inspiration and a breath of fresh air every single time. Now I’m panicking a little bit at the prospect of having to demo the game to a packed room of game developers, and finding a way to communicate what the game is about in only 10 minutes or so.

Speaking of the game, the pace is slowly picking up. There are now 3 developers assigned full-time to the project. The current main focus of work is refactoring the underlying network code (so now you know it’s an online game then!) to make it more robust, we’re also making a proper research for the art style, and narrowing down the minimum product we need to launch on early access or closed alpha.

Stuff like the game’s final name, or levels, or details of some core mechanics are still being defined, even at this advanced stage of development.

As is goes, Secret Project’s development is currently frozen. It has been for the last two months, actually. Not super for the project, but good for the company.

We decided to freeze development right after coming back from Gamescom, because a big contract got signed and we needed everyone on that job to get the ball rolling. Additionally, since the signed project is in the roughly same genre as Secret Project, it would look bad releasing it while initial development was going on on the other one.

And yet, this may turn out to be for the best after all. I am able to take a few steps back on the design and look at it with fresh eyes (the time before Gamescom was pretty crazy in that regard, we completely overhauled the look of the game in 4 weeks!), and we’re also getting to develop some finer technical infrastructure that I hope will carry over to Secret Project once development resumes.

Meanwhile, we’re also getting good vibes from the few people we showed the alpha to in GC, and I still get to go ahead and fill the backlog while no one’s looking to sneak in more important features.

After getting the pitch shortlisted, our first task was to actually prove that the mechanic was viable ASAP. This was a rather unique challenge compared to other selected pitches, since they mostly had to build a regular First Playable.

We had two weeks to make it work. I’m kind of freaking out thinking on how to actually get the mechanic implemented in networked multiplayer under such a short deadline. The project would have most certainly failed its first milestone if it weren’t for the heroic arrival of… El CTO! *cue Mariachi fanfare*

There have been …interesting… developments at work with some clients, the result of which ended up in our doing a company-wide brainstorm for ideas, geared towards internal development and eventual publication.

One of the selected projects is an idea I pitched, and I now find myself at the lead of that project, one with a very nerdy mechanic.

I kind of need to tell someone of how that goes, even though if I cannot yet share what the project is.

Simple and Complex

One of the deepest impressions on someone who happens to wander into a film mixing studio is that there is no necessary connection between ends and means. Sometimes, to create the natural simplicity of an ordinary scene between two people, dozens and dozens of soundtracks have to be created and seamlessly blended into one. At other times an apparently complex ‘action’ soundtrack can be conveyed with just a few carefully selected elements. In other words, it is not always obvious what it took to get the final result: it can be simple to be complex, and complicated to be simple.

The general level of complexity, though, has been steadily increasing over the eight decades since film sound was invented. And starting with Dolby Stereo in the 1970’s, continuing with computerized mixing in the 1980’s and various digital formats in the 1990’s, that increase has accelerated even further. Seventy years ago, for instance, it would not be unusual for an entire film to need only fifteen to twenty sound effects. Today that number could be hundreds to thousands of times greater.

Well, the film business is not unique: compare the single-take, single-track 78rpm discs of the 1930’s to the multiple-take, multi-track surround-sound CDs of today. Or look at what has happened with visual effects: compare King Kong of the 1930’s to the Jurassic dinosaurs of the 1990’s. The general level of detail, fidelity, and what might be called the “hormonal level” of sound and image has been vastly increased, but at the price of much greater complexity in preparation.

The consequence of this, for sound, is that during the final recording of almost every film there are moments when the balance of dialogue, music, and sound effects will suddenly (and sometimes unpredictably) turn into a logjam so extreme that even the most experienced of directors, editors, and mixers can be overwhelmed by the choices they have to make.

So what I’d like to focus on are these ‘logjam’ moments: how they come about, and how to deal with them when they do. How to choose which sounds should predominate when they can’t all be included? Which sounds should play second fiddle? And which sounds – if any – should be eliminated? As difficult as these questions are, and as vulnerable as such choices are to the politics of the filmmaking process, I’d like to suggest some conceptual and practical guidelines for threading your way through, and perhaps even disentangling these logjams.